Dailymotion Executive Says There is Space For Competitors Aside From YouTube To Flourish

As we all know, YouTube makes up an incredibly large portion of the online video landscape. With YouTube getting over 800 million unique visitors per month compared to Dailymotion’s 110 million, YouTube makes up of 41.4% of the total online video market share according to ComScore’s April VideoMetrix. With 58.6% of the pie left, it’s clear that there is room for more than just one sheriff in town in the online video space.

In a recent interview with ZDNet, Marc Eychenne, head of internal content at Dailymotion, notes that with the growing demand for online video content, this leaves new opportunities for alternative players other than YouTube to flourish. This is especially true in areas outside of the U.S. including Europe and Asia. Eychenne states that in this year alone, “[Dailymotion has] seen a 200% audience growth in Thailand and 70% growth in Singapore [and that they’ve] reached 22 millions of unique visitors in Asia-Pacific region.”

One of the biggest points that stuck out to me in this interview was when Eychenne explained that Dailymotion’s marketing strategy was to focus on localization and video suggestion.

“Dailymotion is available in 16 different languages, including Chinese, Vietnamese, Japanese, Korean, as well as in 34 localized versions with local homepages and content. Users have the ability to add subtitles in any language to their video to reach an even larger audience.”

Allow me to go off on a tangent here to relate Facebook’s rise to prominence against Myspace. Back in the early 2000s, Myspace was the undisputed social media king. When it was first launched, Facebook was only usable by college students with a .edu email account. One of Mark Zuckerberg’s strategies for schools that already had their own social network was to not target that school head on, but to focus on getting his social network in schools within a 100-mile radius in the surrounding area first. Then once students of the target school saw their other friends on Facebook, they got on it too. This was the strategy that the Sean Parker character portrayal in “The Social Network” called “the Little Bighorn.” By focusing on niche markets and local areas where YouTube holds less prominence, alternative online video platforms like Dailymotion have a great shot at grabbing a large piece of the industry.

Dailymotion’s prospects look especially bright once you mix in monetization strategies like the launch of their Publisher Network earlier this year. Through this program, publishers can earn advertising revenue by simply embedding the Dailymotion player on their sites. Viewers thus have an incentive to promote Dailymotion while driving higher viewership to the video platform, which equals more advertising revenue for all.

Even with YouTube’s ownership of a large portion of total online video viewers, there is still much more room to grow for its competitors. With their large push on YouTube’s side to showcase more premium content on their site, some independent creators may look for other avenues to harvest and maintain a niche-targeted audience. Also, with many of us looking for the most optimal way to monetize online video content, this leaves much more room for others to come up with new and innovative ideas to gain ad revenue, which will certainly appeal to more creators and advertisers alike.